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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: KING LEAR (1987)

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William Shakespeare, Jr. V: “Just what are you aiming at, Professor?”
Professor Pluggy: [farts]
Goblin maid: “When the professor farts, the moon things are trembling.”

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , Jean-Luc Godard, ,

PLOT: After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster destroys all world culture, William Shakespeare Jr. V, descendant of the famous playwright, seeks to rediscover and re[Lear]n his ancestor’s works; simultaneously, Professor Pluggy investigates the phenomenon of cinema.

COMMENTS: Godard and the cinema – what more can possibly be said? To begin at the end: his 1967 film Weekend concludes with Godard [in]famously declaring the end of cinema. The enfant terrible of the French New Wave returned twenty years later with a post-apocalyptic adaptation of a Shakespeare tragedy in which he equates the non-existence of cinema with Cordelia’s poignant “nothing.” Godard details how this all came about within the film through metanarrative threads woven among scenes adapted from the titular play plus digressions into his many cinematic obsessions.

Godard’s Lear takes place “after Chernobyl.” Despite this premise, the film isn’t convincing as science fiction. It never explains how exactly Chernobyl managed to wipe out the arts beyond a one-sentence statement. Godard isn’t interested in hard science; he has other things on his mind, “no things” to be c[Lear] (or not).

Despite being structured around absence and loss, there’s a lot to unpack in this dense palimpsest of sound, text, and image. Among many literary references besides Shakespeare’s King Lear, details of famous paintings from art history frequently interrupt the action. Intermittent title cards define the film’s “Approach” through a variety of terms (“King Lear: A Clearing”, “King Lear: A cLearing”, “King Lear: Fear and Loathing”, “No Thing”). The chaotic sound mix consists of Beethoven sonatas distorted, slowed down, and overlaid with intrusive Buñuelian noise (seagulls, slurping soup, ocean waves, pigs snorting). Two competing voiceovers, reciting lines from Shakespeare, even drown out the dialogue of the (in-movie) actors.

In Godard’s hands, adaptation turns into an exercise in free association. The seagulls represent Chekov; the waves, Virginia Woolf. “L’Image“, by surrealist poet Paul Reverdy, quoted at length, describes “the image” as “a pure creation of the soul. It cannot be born of a comparison but of a reconciliation of two realities that are more or less far apart. The more the connection between these two realities [birds squawking loudly] are distanced and true, the stronger the image will be, the more it will have emotive power.”

Reverdy’s two realities reflect the conflict between Lear and Cordelia, the dual missions of William and Pluggy to rescue the world’s culture from oblivion, and Godard’s real life struggles with his producers to get the film made. Only two scenes from the actual play make it into the final cut. The entire film explores the opening scene with Lear and Cordelia’s argument. The tragic finale ends up distilled into a single frame.

Fresh off the string of John Hughes films which made her famous, Ringwald portrays Cordelia with patience and melancholy. As “Don Learo,” Meredith recounts the lives of famous gangsters and his own accomplishments with crotchety zeal and professional pride. He tells his daughter with conviction that loss of character is worse than losing money. She remains silent after this anecdote and when he angrily demands a response from her, she utters the famous “Nothing” which exemplifies the loss at the heart of the tragedy.

The rest of the film consists of William scribbling in a notebook while trying to regain his ancestor’s brilliance, and Godard himself as the enigmatic Professor Pluggy, a recluse who spent twenty years in his “editing room” trying to rediscover “the image.” So what exactly is Godard aiming at, amid all this audiovisual clutter? Pluggy serves as a narrator of sorts, yet he consistently mumbles his lines through one side of his mouth like he’s suffered a stroke (I turned on the disc’s closed captioning to make sure I understood what he said, but sometimes the captions simply read “[speaking indistinctly]”).

This muddled “approach” perplexed the few contemporary critics who saw it (many being weirded out by Pluggy’s wig of A/V cables). After the film’s premier at Cannes, the production company didn’t know what to do with it. Lear saw an extremely limited release in Los Angeles and New York then it sank without a trace before being released in France for the first time in 2002.

Nearly forty years later, it can be seen on physical media. In an era witness to the actual death of film stock and the transition to digital video technologies, Godard’s concerns about the future of cinema, and the power and virtue of film makers, remain eerily prescient. An unsatisfactory experience as a Shakespeare adaptation, Godard’s Lear intrigues as the very type of cinematic artifact of the late twentieth century his characters endeavor to excavate within the movie, an ongoing quest to find the image pure and true.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Daylight surrealism at its finest. Goddard is using this meta-textual dreamscape to lull you into an emotional place to explore one of the greatest moments in literary and artistic history. . .”–Andrew J. Eisenman, Elements of Madness [Blu-ray]

(This movie was nominated for review by Deadly Serious Andy, who remarked “I’d love to see the reaction of a roomful of people expecting a ‘normal’ take on the story.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

King Lear (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

King Lear (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]
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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE LICKERISH QUARTET (1970)

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DIRECTED BY: Radley Metzger

FEATURING: Frank Wolff, Erika Remberg, Silvana Venturelli, Paolo Turco

PLOT: A bourgeois family invites a carnival performer back to their castle, convinced they recognize her from a stag film.

Still from The Lickerish Quartet (1970)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The Lickerish Quartet questions the very nature of reality through a series of breezy sex romps. If that’s not enough in itself, there’s a library floor paved with bawdy vocabulary, a magic act that disappears the lead actress from the film within the film, and the fact that every line of dialogue sounds like a riddle.

COMMENTS: In The Lickerish Quartet, softcore pron peddler Radley Metzger steals the Teorema scenario with a healthy dose of inspiration from playwright-philosopher Luigi Pirandello. Throughout his directing career Metzger remained aware of his roots as an editor. He preferred to adapt well-known literary works for his films so he wouldn’t have to worry about plot. The Lickerish Quartet loosely adapts Pirandello’s play “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” first performed in 1921. At the premier, audiences revolted in protest of the fourth-wall breaking metanarrative structure. Here, Metzger constantly reminds us we’re watching a movie through all the tricks of the editor’s trade. The film changes between color and black and white, between past and present, with playful disregard for continuity, and the film within the film and the core story switch places in diagetic reality, along with both sets of cast members.

After growing bored with watching a stag loop together, a middle-aged man (Wolff), his wife (Remberg), and her young adult son (Turco) decide to visit the carnival. They see a girl (Venturelli) in a white catsuit riding the Wall of Death on a motorcycle, and when she takes a bow and removes her helmet she’s revealed to be the spitting image of an actress in the blue movie the family just watched. The father decides to invite her back to their castle to show her the film. The son wishes he wouldn’t, but the mother thinks it will be fun.

The carnival girl accepts the invitation. From the moment she sets foot inside the castle, flashbacks suggest she somehow remembers it. A brief shot shows a man being killed before he falls through a doorway and down a flight of stairs, prompting the carnival girl to ask, “Who has the gun? To do the shooting?”

What they expected to be a fun flirty lark has already taken an ominous turn for the family. “There isn’t going to be any shooting,” the father says; “but of course there is,” the girl replies. Before they show her the stag film, the son performs a magic act and the carnival girl disappears. When the reel begins to play, her doppelgänger’s face is no longer visible on screen. On a third viewing, the blonde girl in the film is an entirely different actress. The mother and father are confused and disappointed, but they convince the girl to spend the night.

In ‘s Teorema a mysterious stranger visits a bourgeois family and seduces each of them in turn. The results of the seductions vary, but in the end the total effect is devastating. Quartet runs this plot backward. Metzger rewinds the bickering family back to their beginnings, to World War II, the source of their conflicts and tensions.

A look into the source text reveals Metzger hews pretty closely to Pirandello’s scenario. The “Six Characters in Search of an Author” are identified only by their roles within a step-family, the result of a woman’s affair sanctioned by her husband. The plot centers around the complexities of their relationships and the impact of transgressive sexuality. In the metanarrative, their stories were left uncompleted by their original creator, so they seek an author in order to achieve resolution.

In updating it to the present day and paring down the family to four members, Metzger makes the material more accessible to contemporary audiences and a society still coming to terms with the legacy of WWII. The carnival girl becomes “The Author” who literally fleshes out the characters’ memories, personalities, and desires.

Pirandello believed reality is an illusion and everyone should be aware of it; he also believed this awareness would lead only to unhappiness. Metzger is far less pessimistic. The carnival girl makes the family members whole people through their sexual encounters with her. Far from tearing them apart, this shared experience brings the family closer together and makes them capable of seeing each other’s different perspectives.

In creating an avant-garde skin flick with philosophical underpinnings, Metzger confused and frustrated critics, who struggled with how to classify Quartet when they didn’t outright dismiss it. Featuring Metzger’s usual attention to the details of production design, Quartet straddles the ditch between low- and high-brow with ease. Ultramodern décor artfully situated within an actual medieval castle mirrors the characters’ inner journeys from the present to their pasts. Despite frequent syncopated cuts to enigmatic scenes (a close-up of a reclining woman’s crossed ankles and magenta high-heeled shoes; the dying man falling down the stairs), a mood of dreamy sensuality prevails.

With its dual focus on subjectivity and sexual mores, it’s no surprise Pirandello’s play spoke to Metzger as a film maker. Metzger learned editing during his military service while working on propaganda films for the United States government. He knew better than most people how movies shape reality, and vice versa.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[Metzger and co-writer Michael de Forrest] must have dreamed up the story line late at night, for it’s a weirdo of the first order, a confusing blend of fantasy, reality, and illusion…”–Thomas Blakely, The Pittsburgh Press (contemporaneous)

The Lickerish Quartet [Blu-ray]

The Lickerish Quartet [Blu-ray]
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CAPSULE: THE GRASS LABYRINTH (1979)

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Kusa-meikyû

DIRECTED BY: Shuji Terayama

FEATURING: Hiroshi Mikami, Takeshi Wakamatsu, Keiko Niitaka

PLOT: A youth embarks on a quest through his unconscious to uncover a tune that his mother used to sing for him as a child.

Still from The Grass Labyrinth (1979)

COMMENTS: Shuji Terayama, emperor of Japan’s post-war avant-garde scene, made a name for himself mainly through experimental plays and films such as Death in the Country, The Fruits of Passion (starring ), and the controversial Emperor Tomato Ketchup. Grass Labyrinth is a 40 minute work that extravagantly exhibits the author’s tendencies and style while also assuming a relatively restrained approach.

The premise of an investigation into the labyrinth of memory allows for an exercise in oneiric and experimental filmmaking free from the solidity of conventional narrative. Images float in and out of the screen in a liquid stream of consciousness, like half-remembered memories (the other half filled by reconstructions, dreams and hallucinations) in a state of hypnagogia. Recurring motifs and ideas form a subliminal thread that never assumes the form of a clear and rational plot: mother figure, appearing in an Oedipal context (already suggested by the film’s premise); open fields; the ocean; and, of course, the melody of the song that our protagonist so desperately seeks, the picture’s main leitmotif.

The search for a lost childhood item (with all its psychological implications) provides the film’s central point of focus, the axis around which all the apparitions dance. The immersion in the confusing (and occasionally terrifying) sea of childhood memories summons a cast of disquieting sights and sounds, specters of all sorts that haunt the boy’s psychic depths. The mother, who at times seems to be conflated with the song itself, is the most prominent vision, but we can’t ignore the contribution of the unnamed woman who inspires contradictory attitudes of attraction and repulsion in the main character, or a troupe of demonic figures that burst into the film in a loud and ritualistic spectacle typical of Terayama’s style.

Grass Labyrinth succeeds in replicating the aura of a striking but badly remembered dream, or a trip down unconscious lane. Like other works by Terayama, it subverts the conventional trappings of cinema in order to provide an experience that couldn’t be communicated otherwise. Standing in between the author’s more experimental short-films and his (relatively) more accessible full-length outings, it works well as an introduction to the overlooked auteur.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a surreal trip of a short film…. It doesn’t take long for Akira’s journey to fall down a rabbit hole of weirdness and the movie quite literally ends in a madhouse.”–Trevor Wells, Geeks

Apocryphally Weird

45*. SPACE IS THE PLACE (1974)

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“I am strange,
my mind is tinted with the colors of madness,
they fight in silent furor in their effort to possess each other,
I am strange.”–Sun Ra, “I Am Strange”

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Ray Johnson

PLOT: Sun Ra returns to earth from his cosmic explorations with plans to relocate black folk to a new planet. Arriving in his spaceship in Oakland, Ra visits a youth community center and opens an outer space employment agency to spread his message.; NASA agents kidnap him, hoping to learn his technological secrets. Meanwhile, in a desert dimension, Ra and the pimp-like Overseer play a card game for the future of the black race.

Still from Space Is the Place (1974)

BACKGROUND:

  • Sun Ra was born Herman Poole Blount. He dropped out of college after he had a vision in which he was transported to the planet Saturn (or so he claimed). Never signed to a big record label, Ra toured and recorded prolifically, especially throughout his 1950s and 1960s heyday, releasing albums himself. His music was highly avant-garde, incorporating free jazz, synthesizers, chanting, oddball poetry incorporating mythological and space-faring themes, Egyptian costuming, and lavish stage productions.
  • The producer originally envisioned the film as a documentary, but input from many sources (including Ra himself) eventually led to this narrative movie.
  • Filmed in 1972 at the same time and on some of the same sets (and with one of the same actors) as the pornographic film Behind the Green Door. Space Is the Place was briefly released theatrically in 1974. It then disappeared until an edited version surfaced on VHS in the early 1990s.
  • Sun Ra improvised all of his dialogue, as did the kids interviewed at the community center.
  • Confusingly, Sun Ra’s classic 1972 album “Space is the Place” is not the soundtrack to this film, despite the fact that Ra wears a costume from the production on the cover. The actual soundtrack album was recorded contemporaneously but not released until 1993. The two albums share only the title track in common, in a radically different performance.
  • In 2003, scenes were restored which were missing from the VHS release. These scenes, featuring nudity, violence, or other debauchery inserted by co-screenwriter Joshua Smith, had been removed by Sun Ra himself; therefore, the 64-minute VHS cut is sometimes known as the “Sun Ra cut.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Su  Ra’s Egyptian costume, especially his crown combining a King Tut-styled headdress topped by an enormous solar crystal flanked by golden antlers. (It resembles the crown worn by Isis.) Ra’s fashion choices earn him some genuine stares from pedestrians as he drives through Oakland streets in a convertible, flanked by a golden-headed lion and a falcon. This majestic Pharonic helmet was so striking it made both the cover of both the movie poster and the identically titled jazz album.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Tarot blackjack for black souls; “Dixie” torture

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: An improvised mashup of surrealism, blaxploitation tropes, bizarro cosmic jazz, and messianic intergalactic Egyptology, Space Is the Place is an outsider artifact that could only have come from one man: the great Sun Ra.

DVD release trailer for Space is the Place

COMMENTS: Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and Sun Continue reading 45*. SPACE IS THE PLACE (1974) →

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CAPSULE: CAVERNA (2023)

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Caverna can be rented on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Daniel Contaldo, Hannah Swayze

FEATURING: Giorgia Tomasi, Lorenzo Passaniti, Caterina Fornaciai

PLOT: A group of Italian 20-somethings explore their childhoods and psychological ailments via avant-garde theater exercises.

Still from Caverna (2023)

COMMENTS:

The most meandering film I’ve ever seen:
Caverna, Caverna, Caverna, Caverna!
The most grousing and wibble-cam there’s ever been—
Caverna, Caverna, Caverna, Caverna, Caverna, Caverna, Caverna.

I’ve just watched a film named Caverna…

By now I have largely made my point, but in an effort to give this whatsit a fairer shake, let me lay down some less flippant remarks. With dream flashbacks and otherwise linear progression, Contaldo and Swayze (which would make a great pair of names on a P.I.s’ office door) tell a story about a group of young, aspiring actors—with a focus on country-bred Lorenzo and Catholic Giorgia—honing their performance-art chops while battling inner demons. Giorgia was a disappointment to her folks, more interested in playing in the dirt than in bending to a rigid religious hierarchy; Lorenzo was a disappointment to his father, wanting to wander the nearby hills and fields as opposed to… well, it wasn’t quite clear just what exactly the possibly-carpenter patriarch wanted from the boy. Guiding Giorgia, Lorenzo, et al. is Alba, an instructor who isn’t above playing favorites; and who, to me, seemed to be making things up as she went along. (Mind you, this may have been the point—or I may have missed the point.)

Caverna is, at least, only an hour long, and during my viewing exhibited the good sense to slip in a twist of tone right around the time I had resigned myself to staring vacantly at the screen. The neophyte performers acquitted themselves adequately, but forget any story (something I don’t actually demand of a film anymore)—there isn’t even a committed pursuit of any particular concept, or even mood. Sure, sure, we get it: childhood traumas, particularly emotional ones, are serious business and can seriously fracture the victims. But the two featured youths seemed more disaffected and occasionally annoyed than particularly addled. They pursue their career goals (“the true performer paints with the eyes of his mind!”), party vaguely, chat idly, and smoke prodigiously in front of charming, down-at-the-heel Old World backdrops. The dreams they relate to one another in class drip with heavy symbolism (of course, it may just be that my own dreams are never nearly so psychologo-poetical), and Lorenzo’s burst of anger—that twist of tone I mentioned—stems neither from anything much apparent, nor from much that might reasonably be guessed at.

As the directors  swap between the hazy saturation of dream-reminiscences and the cinema verité of the real lives and theater-ness of the troupe, there’s just enough filmic flair and character charm to keep your attention. But you will be relieved when the timer goes off, and you can move on with your life.

(At the time of this writing, Caverna was available free on Tubi and other free-streaming services).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Things take a weird turn, and this ‘theater workshop’ becomes the stage for a surrealistic fantasy that’s hard to explain. To be fair, if “weird for the sake of being weird” is your thing, then you may well love this experience. I could appreciate what they were attempting; unfortunately, it didn’t land for me.”–Chris Jones, Overly Honest Movie Reviews (contemporaneous)